Winter Journey (2008) by Tony Towle

Winter Journey (2008)
by Tony Towle $16.00

Hanging Loose Press
Brooklyn, New York
isbn 978-1-931236-93-5


Review by Irene Koronas

many of the poems are complete stories; his poem,
‘Ethnicity,’ is a succinct visit to the laundry, the
cleaners: “are you Jewish? asked /the elderly Chinese
lady at /the dry cleaners my girlfriend had
recommended…“ the poem ends with his telling his
girlfriend of the encounter. and in the poem
’Illuminations (Diverse Miniatures)’ 1. tableau.
“…into the sink of the Pennsylvanian present where she
washes the dishes to the violins of the rainswept
interstate.” Towle shows us a slice of contemporary
life, almost a photograph except for the some times
juxtaposition of an out of context jabber wacky.

some of the poems are simple scenes and require simple
form and words but Towle insists on couching his view
of the world and people within the rhetoric or
language of the language poets. “Anthropomorphic
Etiquette’ 6. “the female rooster should always follow
her instincts and then perhaps apologize for the
misunderstanding.” I quote the above because I’m not
sure what he is referring to. and why should I have to
guess at the meaning. yes, I know what anthropomorphic
indicates.

Towle has one foot on past poetic forms, surreal and
lets say a villanelle, and another foot on a
dictionary. : 2. ‘Impertinence.’ “like the sun, I
endured a turbulent childhood and became allergic to
interstellar dust while contending with encircling
debris that would have made any entity dizzy, hot,
unstable and content to just float there and smolder
for eons in a grumpy and extended recovery period as
the center of a gratuitous and onerous “system” before
imploding into cosmic isolation.” indeed a grand way
of talking about death.

this book of poems is a picture book taken from his
momentary and perhaps his present journey through
life. the reader will find themselves engrossed and at
times repelled by his encounters. in his poem ‘The
investigation,’ we tour the great central library with
him. Towle is looking at himself and finding himself,
not who he wants to be but who he is and how he is
perceived. “…what I was tossing from the cup were
three-dimensional symbols that in my pose I could not
quite turn my head to comprehend.”

Irene Koronas
reviewer
Ibbetson street press
poetry editor
wilderness house literary review

Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival.

Poet Meg Kearney has accepted a slot in next year's Somerville News Writers Festival. http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com



She will join poets Afaa Michael Weaver, Tino Villanueva, fiction writer Junot Diaz, and others to be announcedNov. 15, 2008.



See Bio below:



Meg Kearney (“car-nee”)



Meg Kearney’s first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released by Persea Books in 2005. A paperback edition of the novel will be published in tandem with a teacher’s guide in late 2007.

Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998); Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), Poets Grimm (Storyline Press, 2003), Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2005), Shade (Four Way Books, 2006), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, 2007). She is also co-editor of Blues for Bill: a Tribute to William Matthews (Akron University Press 2005). Her nonfiction essay, “Hello, Mother, Goodbye,” will be appear in The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Kathryn Stripling Byer and forthcoming by Helicon Nine Press in fall 2007.

Meg is Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Summer Writers Conference. For 11 years prior to joining Pine Manor, she was Associate Director of the National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, in New York City. She also taught poetry at the New School University. Early in her career, she organized educational programs and conducted power plant tours for a gas and electric company in upstate New York.

Recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, Meg also received a New York Times Fellowship and the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Award in 1998; the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York in 1997; and the Frances B. DeNagy Poetry Award from Marist College in 1985. She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1999, 2000, and 2001. She is a former poetry editor of Echoes, a quarterly literary journal, and past president of the Hudson Valley Writers Association of upstate New York.

Meg was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. She received her MA in Poetry from The City College, City University of New York, in 1999. She resides in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Mike Fleming, and their three-legged black Lab, Trooper.

Manufacturing America: Poems From the Factory Floor by Lisa Beatman

Manufacturing America

Poems from the Factory Floor

by Lisa Beatman

Ibbetson Press, Somerville, MA

Copyright 2008

61 pages, $14.95

Review by Lo Galluccio



"We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood"

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood


“Hands are tongues on the graveyard shift or are they wings?”

Lisa Beatmen, Manufacturing America


It’s not so much that Lisa Beatman’s soon-to-be American citizens laboring for factory wages and learning English in Manufacturing America, resemble those of Thomas’ small town in Wales; it’s just that I can hear the same kind of radio play rise from the vividly acute portraits of this book. While Thomas was despairing, ironic and a dreadful alcoholic from that lyrically poetic and estranged country, Beatman and her characters are for the most part, strong, cool and sober, give or take the indulgence of a Krispy Kreme donut. They are, however, more eccentric and varied in their struggle for survival. And that includes one industriously dreamy mouse who appears three times in the book, as a kind of shadow play from the very bottom rung. All creatures, afterall, must find their niche and scrap their way through the factory floors that once kept America in full industrial tilt. What’s amazing is the way Beatman captures the language and expressive nature of their day-to-day grind, each detail lacquered on to a beautiful mosaic of faces and voices and souls. Though their jobs may be outsourced, we are left with a sense of tenacity and high spirit from this community.


In the poem “Rainbow” Lisa presents Juan from Santiago, Chile in the beginning and beams him onto the paper factory-- from casting his net on a Rainbow Lake to another man, in another kind of state::


“Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows

his colors: purple is A-F

blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,

red is Q-T, green is U-Z.

His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts

sort the folders that will hold each child’s story.”


While Beatman may not be wholly optimistic about the conditions of the Factory Floor, she doesn’t cast her subjects as Marxist victims, bur rather as mostly their own inventions -- as efficiently creating what others will use. They are worker bees, but they can sting and bob and wear sexy clothes too.


In “Citizen Delia” Beatman writes about a Latina woman who determines to present her own image of womanhood in order to gain her citizenship:


“Delia is getting citizened up.

A samba-hipped woman

who wants to be a hyphenated-American.

She glues perma-clips on folders.

One by one. And grabs lunch on her feet.

Except for Tuesdays.

Pizza and Citizenship day.

Delia doesn’t like pizza

but what can you do?


>>>>


Delia has another idea.

She already put her clothes on the bed.

A red blouse down to here.

A black mini-skirt, short-short.

The new push-up bra.

In the store Manuela the baby

said Mami your boobs are growing.

Good.

She hopes the immigration officer is a man.”


(While never faced with a citizenship wardrobe test, I can remember what it was like to go before a ladies man judge in NYC Housing Court four times in one year. A pretty skirt and well made up face never hurt my cause as a struggling apartment renter on the Lower East Side.)


In the second part of the book, labeled, “Second Shift” our mouse makes his second appearance. In a jolting metaphysical moment filled with “snakes of smoke” and “the tiny atom…yoked and whipped and branded,” our furry friend is found in a state of bewildered fear:


“Mouse sniffs all around.

This new trail of gauzy heat –

What lies at the other end?

Will it, charmed, wind lazily upwards

To weave into the grey pall overhead

Or snap its tail, rattling

The timbers and bricks down?

Mouse waits in a corner, trembling.”


And we hone in on a meaner side to this exhibit of workers and their dilemmas.


I In “Coffee Break,” “Scrap” and “Hack Job” the more brutal realities of factory life come to the fore.


“Hack,

one machine operator

on the dole,

hack,

two secretaries

shopping with food stamps

hack, hack, hack,

three departments decapitated.


How will the body live

with no framework

to hang its flesh on?”


And so, we come back to the perennial American question, brought to us in part by a 12-step program mandating those “stay positive” mantras. You know the question. “Is the glass half empty or half full?” What’s the better way, the survivalist way, to look at it?


In “Parking,” Lisa poses the same question from a backdrop of how a parking lot can determine who punches in on time and whose used car gets protected.


“Maria sat in the cafeteria

next to an empty chair.

She’d finally got a spot

where her “67 Chevy wouldn’t cook.”


>>>>>>>


The foreman is talking to Abner

whose brother is home with the want ads.

We only need happy people here.

How do you see it my friend –

is the parking lot half empty

or half full?


Well, if I had a quibble with this brilliant pink (pink like fingernail polish, pink like a rose tombstone, pink like Asian kitsch) expose of a paper plant and its workers it would be the lengthy addendum, “Firng Uncle Hillel” which seems to me a bit out of place, as a long prose piece in the collection. A minor point. Lisa well makes up for this lapse in her finale, “Copyright.”


“Like a page on fire,

elbows cocked into question marks,

Leyla Chang invades my dream

strips the white sheet

from my body

plucks the pen from

my twitching fingers

What’s this she says

About you writing my life?

Since when did I

Become a page number

In your table of contents?

Since when did I volunteer

to furnish your castle

honey

who died and gave you

the right to copy me?



Many near perfect poems, an arc that sustains, and a subject that deserves much light, levity and attention paid to it. This book is a winner. As the daughter of an Italian immigrant who would have died to play baseball with the Red Sox and became a Labor Lawyer instead, I can fully appreciate Lisa Beatman’s grasp of these tough, savvy and wonderful people.


Doug Holder’s Ibbetson St. Press evolves yearly into an ever more fascinating literary enterprise.


NB: Lisa Beatman is now managing adult literacy programs at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. She won Honorable Mention for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg International Poetry Peace Prize, and was awarded a Massachusettts Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil. She may be reached at lisabeatman@yahoo.com.


Lo Galluccio

Author of “Hot Rain,” a poetry chap

on Singing Bone Press & two solo CDs,

“Being Visited” and “Spell on You.”

The Trapeze Diaries. Marie Carter.

The Trapeze Diaries. Marie Carter. ( Hanging Loose Press Brooklyn, NY) $16.


Most of us in a time of need, when we seek the sap of succor, look to find the sympathetic ear of a psychotherapist, a clergyman, a guru, or even a local barkeep. But in your wildest imagination, would you seek wisdom, the answer to the myriad of ontological questions from a trapeze artist? Most definitely not. But Marie Carter in her evocative and engaging memoir released from the Hanging Loose Press:” The Trapeze Diaries,” an aerialist seems like a natural choice.

Have if you will, as Rod Serling would phrase it on “The Twilight Zone,” a one Miss Marie Carter. A young woman, quiet and overly cautious, with a literary bent, who finds herself newly transplanted from Scotland to the Naked City of New York, coming to terms with herself and the recent death of her father. Being a solipsist I was fascinated by what I could see of myself in the insecurities of Miss. Carter. Her fears and doubts have been and are very much my own, and may I dare say , perhaps yours?

But Carter doesn’t take a sedentary approach to matters. This intrinsically unathletic, bookish woman throws herself into the art of the aerialist. She takes regular lessons and stretches both her mind and body in a truly original fashion. Carter writes with strokes of clarity and simplicity and her prose is never weighed down with purple flourishes.

Carter emerges from her lessons transformed from a woman seriously out of touch with her mind and body to a woman in love with the human form:

“I am coming to fall deeply in love with the human body and its nuances; mine is more useful than I ever had imagined. I start reading anatomy books and then mouthing the words of the muscle groups in my body, my hands covering my forearms, elbows, triceps, shoulders, feeling the texture of my muscles, the hardness of each bone. I do this with my eyes closed, as though reading Braille.”

At each lesson Carter gleans bits of worldly wisdom from the aerialist’s instructions and she eventually is able to let go of the ghost of her deceased father, and the stranglehold of fears that corsets her life. In this passage the aerialist as sage is fully realized:



“ The Aerialist has more faith in me than I have in myself. I am trying to take my knee off the bar for One-Knee Hang. It is a trick that I believe to be beyond me; nonetheless when it is my turn, I can the Aerialist watching me out of the corner of her eye, hoping I will complete it….

The Aerialist has told me to imagine I am strong, and I as I do that, I actually feel myself becoming stronger.

“Sometimes you can change a person’s whole path of doing something with the tiniest adjustment of movement.”

I thought she was going to say: ‘ You can change a person’s whole life.’”



A wonderful read. Highly recommended.



Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Feb 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

Junot Diaz, Afaa Michael Weaver and Tino Villanueva to be featured at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 15 2008

Well we are already booking for The Somerville News Writers Festival, http://www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com which will be in its sixth year next November. We have secured Junot Diaz in Fiction, Afaa Michael Weaver and Tino Villanueva in Poetry. Weaver will be the recipient of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award. Previous winners have been Robert Pinsky, David Godine Jr, Robert K. Johnson, Louisa Solano, and Jack Powers.




JUNOT DIAZ










Junot Diaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker magazine which listed him as one of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. He has also been published in Story, The Paris Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories four times (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and African Voices. He is best known for his two major works: the short story collection Drown (1996) and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Both were published to critical acclaim..




AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER









Afaa Michael Weaver in 1985 received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Immediately upon receiving the NEA fellowship he retired from factory life to enter Brown University's graduate creative writing program on a full university fellowship. In that same year his first book, Water Song, was published by Callaloo Press at the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. from Excelsior in 1986 and in 1987 he received his M.A. (M.F.A.) from Brown. At Brown he studied poetry with Keith Waldrop, C.D. Wright, and Michael S. Harper. His focus was in playwriting and theater, and for those concentrations he studied with the late George H. Bass and Paula Vogel.

In 1985 Weaver was commissioned to write a poem in honor of Roy DeCarava. The poem entitled "The Dancing Veil" was presented to DeCarava at the annual conference of the Society for Photographic Education on March 20-23, 1986 in Baltimore, Maryland. The poem was subsequently published in Hanging Loose.

He began his teaching career as an adjunct in 1987, teaching at New York University, the City University of New York, Seton Hall Law School, and Essex County College. In 1990, he began at Rutgers Camden and received tenure with distinction there as an early candidate. In 1998, he took a full time position at Simmons College as the Alumnae Professor of English.

In that same year he was named a Pew fellow in poetry.

Weaver was a member of the faculty of Cave Canem in 1997, and he was later given the honor of being the organization's Elder.

In the spring semester of 1997,he was named the sixteenth poet-in-residence at the Stadler Poetry Center of Bucknell University. He was the first poet of African descent to hold that position.

Between 1985 to 2005, he published nine collections of poetry, had two professional theater productions, published short fiction in journals and anthologies, and served as editor of Obsidian III, based at North Carolina State University. His short fiction appears in Gloria Naylor's Children of the Night, the sequel to Langston Hughes' anthology, Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. He has given several hundred readings in the U.S., Great Britain, France, China, and Taiwan.

Weaver is featured in the film A String of Pearls, a Camille Billops work which is part of the Hatch Billops Archives in New York City.

In 2002 he began studying Mandarin Chinese formally after teaching at National Taiwan University as a Fulbright scholar that spring. In 2004, he convened the Simmons International Chinese Poetry conference, the largest such gathering of contemporary Chinese poets held outside of China and Taiwan to date.

He was recently featured on the front cover of Poets and Writers Magazine and Poetry Magazine, and has new poetry collection “Plum Flower Dance.” ( Univ.of Pitt.)




TINO VILLANUEVA




Tino Villanueva is a Chicano writer who according to celebrated poet Martin Espada invented (along with Gary Soto), a new genre of poetry. Espada opines that Villanueva conceived: “…serious literature about farm workers. That in itself guarantees Tino a place in literary history.” Villanueva, who earned a PhD in Spanish Literature, and is a professor at Boston University, does not however live in a literary ghetto of Latino literature. Reginald Gibbons, former editor of Tri- Quarterly magazine wrote that Villanueva has: “… found a way, to write of both worlds (Chicano and Anglo) that makes sense, I believe to all readers, even those who might be interested in one of those worlds or the other.”

Villanueva has received a 1994 American Book Award for “Scene for the Movie Giant,” and has penned a number of books, including: “Primera Causa/ First Cause,’ “Shaking off the Dark,” and others. He also edited the literary magazine: “Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal.”

Review of "Manufacturing America: Poems From The Factory Floor" Lisa Beatman

Manufacturing America
Poems From the Factory Floor
By Lisa Beatman
ISBN 978-0-6151-8124-0
61 pages at 14.95 soft cover
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143
Review by Laurel Johnson

Historically, since the America’s beginning, factory jobs have been held by immigrants hoping for a better life. Today those jobs are disappearing at a disturbing rate. With each manufacturing plant closure -- or relocation to foreign soil -- workers find themselves without jobs or income. Lisa Beatman’s second book gives readers a view of immigrants we won’t find on the news. Ms. Beatman’s hopeful immigrants come to us from the Mekong Delta, from south of the Rio Grande, from Europe, and every corner of the globe to become scrub women, fruit pickers, factory workers, meat packers. Immigrants today look to the “New World” for the same promise sought by our parents and grandparents:

This new world
was all coal-stink and pandemonium,
the shouts of men caught
by low ceilings and careened back,
twofold in strength.

In “Rainbow” young Chileans with calloused hands pick fruit while working their way across country to Boston, where they learn their colors and numbers making folders for a children’s hospital:

Juan is mute as a lake, but he knows
his colors: purple is A-F,
blue is G-K, yellow is L-P,
red is Q-T, green is U-Z.
His calloused hands, tattooed with paper cuts
sort the folders that will hold each child’s story.

In “Manufacturing America” Russian Jews come seeing a Cossack-free world. Regardless of what their profession was once, they work in factories so their families can eat:

These Russian Jews
conjugate each Wednesday
in class at the paper factory.
They bite their lips to say ‘visa’ and ‘vinegar’
They purse them to say ‘want ads’ and ‘why.’

For every worker in America, immigrant and non-immigrant, life has changed. “Hack Job” is a powerful poem that shares truths both painful and poignant. How will American workers -- and our country -- survive outsourcing and downsizing?

The bones of the body
are cracking
one by one
their marrow sacked
in a welter
of downsizing.

Hack,
one machine operator
on the dole,
hack
two secretaries
shopping with food stamps,
hack hack hack,
three departments
decapitated

How will the body live
with no framework
to hang its flesh on?

The boss just twists
the tourniquet
so we don’t bleed dry.
Who will stay the axe?
Who will trim the stumps?
How will we learn
to walk again?

Neither readers nor Ms. Beatman have the answers, but she presents facts for our consideration through exceptional poetry and prose. This book should be required reading in every school and university in America because it shines a kindlier light on immigrants and their struggles, a light seldom seen today.


Review by Laurel Johnson . Laurel Johnson is a reviewer for the Midwest Book Review.

Novemberly by Lyn Lifshin

Novemberly
By Lyn Lifshin
e.s.p. press
Box 337
Brookhaven, NY 11719
Copyright 2007
$10.00
Review by Lo Galluccio


You have to wonder when the woman has time to dry her hair….but then you figure she’s just letting that long lavish mane dry in whatever wind comes along. Why can’t I picture Lyn Lifshin with a blow dryer in her hand anyway?

One of the most prolific poets of our time, Lifshin has put out a new chapbook called Novembery, on e.s.p. press. It draws its images and free verse (dribbled like a careful sandcastle in lines usually 3-4 words long) from this time in her life, and a major relationship of her past. – her relationship with her mother. At first, Lifshin writes as if she’s managing a time lapse photo, each poem a slightly different unfolding of the themes of the one before, each one contributing to our deepening sense of the entire subject. Thematic and lyrical – as many but not all of her works are – Novemberly starts with a “night drive from Austerlitz/an hour north to bring in my plants/early September….” The poem introduces the geraniums which are recast in the succeeding poems, as if they were so real as to be animals….”geraniums under a quilt last night, a blotch of red opening/on the front steps what looked like lint/ has small pink claws and feet.,” from the first poem of the collection: Today, Longing for Upstate, Unseasonably Cold, Highs only in the Mid Thirties.”

She draws from Greek mythology in the poem, “Maybe but it Feels More Septemberly” in writing about herself as Persephone, the goddess who must spend six months in the underworld before her mother Demeter draws her back up into the earth’s arms: “under my hair I’m /Persephone, not quite/ up for so much bloom,/ I feel more like some/ thing dark under layers/ of night, the brown/ seeds of silver dollars…”

Something like a swift and deftly traced travelogue of that fall-time, she includes poems about her sister as well at the time of her mother’s death – the recriminations one can feel within a family in “The Images, the Faces, My Sister’s Eyes,” when there are “15 years no truce, no phone.” Furthermore she writes, “I stopped the cards. ‘You murdered the victims twice’ she squealed at a last funeral. Someone said my face turned snow.” We can feel the sting of reproach in the compactness of the last sentence. Again Lifshin turns to the oncoming season of winter, her face turning into snow to match it.

Like a Bergman film clip, she repeats the scene in the next poem, “Another Woman who Looks like my Sister,” “dove grey eyes or/ maybe the sea/ruby birth, the same blood we share /but of course don’t/It made it easier,/ what you said, /knifed what I’d /have needed /to go on/….Your /scream shriek,/ then, face distorted/ I didn’t know you.” Her sister, in her hateful and shocked explosion, literally becomes something else, an abstraction, another woman to Lyn Lifshin.

She documents the turning points in her mother’s aging. “I Lift my Mother to the Commode,” describes a heart-wrenching moment when her mother losses mobility and Lyn and a stranger help her. “Our/ awkward dance to lift /her hopeless as prayers/ for mercy, a reprieve/ but I try to not show my/ fear and now see her/ tremble as the doorbell/ rings, Verizon, to install/ a private line she’ll be/ alive less than a week to/ use. Still on the commode,/ my stranded mother is/ lifted by the smiling man /as if it was part of every/ day’s phone service,/ gently as if carrying /a bride over the threshold/ for a new life.” In this way, Lifshin again conjures an elegant travail – like a dancer on a beam of light.-- out of a moment many of us would find humiliating and awful.

The arc of the book, from Lyn’s remembering her mother alive, her funeral scenes that flash by with her estrangement to her sister, and Lyn always seeing herself a figure in the midst with emails and boxes to pack and feelings to explore like her plants, we come back to a poem about Lyn’s illustrious mane of hair, as if it were part of the trademark of her many extensions of living from roots to fly-away ends. In “The Mad Girl has Butterflies in her Hair,” she writes, “not just Monarchs/ but owl butterflies, swallow/ tails, mourning cloaks,/ viceroys and painted/ ladies. Wings brush/ her skin….”

The chapbook includes several lovely photos of Lyn’s mother and herself, as both child and adult.

It is a book like the sign of Virgo, entreating us like a deceptively small white rose.

I am always a fan.

Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press

Feb. 2008
Somerville, Mass.

Home Planet News:Winter/Spring 2008/Interview with Jared Smith

An Interview with Jared Smith

with Doug Holder

Poet Jared Smith’s latest collection of poetry is ‘Lake Michigan and Other Poems” (Puddinhead Press). His other collection include: ‘ Walking The Perimeters Of the Plate Glass Factory” (Birch Book Press, NY 2002), “Keeping the Outlaw Alive” (Erie St.Press, Chicago 1988), Dark Wing (Charred Norton Publishing New York, 1984), and “Song Of The Blood” (The Smith Press, New York, 1983.) He has published hundreds of times in a wide number of literary journals and magazines over the past 25 years. I met with him after a reading he gave at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.


Doug Holder: You said at your reading that you don’t have much of an affinity for the academy or academic poetry.

Jared Smith: That’s not quite what I mean. I had an academic upbringing. My father won scholarships to Harvard and Brown. He was the Dean of Continuing Education at New York University. I grew up knowing an awful lot of literary types…intellectuals. I mean there is a real difference between shallow, stylized academic thinking and hardworking people who build a culture.

Holder: You seem to have an affinity for the workers. You said not enough people are writing about them these days.

Smith: It is not popular to write about them in media circles. But the workers themselves are writing. You have tremendous energy on the open mic scene. Many of the participants are dishwashers and such during the day. In Chicago we have active poets from all walks of life. There are a lot of people with raw literacy, and it is important not to loose touch with that.

Holder: Can you tell me about your friendship with Donald Lev, the founder of Home Planet News, a respected independent lit mag started in Greenwich Village in the 70’s?

Smith: Home Planet News has been around for 28 years, but Don has been editing magazines before then and I had the honor of having a regular column in one of them. I met Lev through a wonderful poet around my age named Paul Henning. Paul was writing an epic poem—a science fiction poetry epic called La Via Del Tren Subterraneo es Peligrosa—or “ Subway Tracks Are Dangerous.” He had no money but knew how to take advantage of the system. He share a loft in NYC with a slightly older, wiser and somewhat humorously grumpy Bohemian poet, Donald Lev. We would sit around the studio and talk poetry. This was around 1977, after he had finished publishing HYN and was starting up POETS with Mike Devlin and Philippe Chaurize. I was honored when he asked me to be guest columnist. Paul was involved also, and he also wrote reviews under the name Wergild Krank. My column ran five times and then in the first issue of Home Planet News. I was also on the screening committee of the New York Quarterly.


Holder: You say you are a Transcendentalist. How do you define that?

Smith: If you study objects closely, you discover that all things are basically of the same nature. Whitman and Emerson felt that there was a life source or awareness that people can reach into. I feel it differently. I feel an affinity to animate and inanimate objects, as well as to people. If you open your awareness of what is around you, that which is outside your body, you realize there is something much bigger than you are, but you are part of it. I try to push that---feel what the human experience is about, rather than what my body is about.

Holder: Where did the germ of the idea for your poem “Lake Michigan” come from?

Smith: Who really knows what triggers a poem? It was a very intense learning process. It started with my walking the dog under the stars along the lake one night. I started thinking, “Why does the Lake—Lake Michigan—fascinate me so much? Why does the water fascinate me and everyone so much?” So I started out on a personal level, then on a human level, and then beyond all that. I wanted to know why water is so important. And the ideas and visions just kept opening outward.

Holder: You are not afraid to write political poems. You have strong views. Some say political poetry is polemic, not art. What do you say?

Smith: I have an awful time saying what poetry is. If you read someone like Robert Lowell, or you read Allen Ginsberg, they’re quite different from each other. It is totally different than an open mic rant, if you will. In all these cases, though, poetry is a condensed rhythmic language. You bring things down to a few words—to explore something that cannot be talked about in commercial terms. Poetry should be a language of ideas. There is no taboo for art.

Holder: You left Greenwich Village and went back to your home in the Midwest why?

Smith: Life does strange things to one. And it did it to me. You have to be flexible—you have to respond. I was in graduate school, my father passed away, and my family was in debt. I was busy writing poetry, but as you know you don’t make much money. I started consulting for an energy-consulting firm. I just walked in and said;” You write bad promotional copy.” I can do better.” So I built a career. When you put in 16 or 17 hours a day at a job, you don’t have time to write poetry. I gave up the job 5 years ago.

Holder: How do you make a living now?

Smith: I write, think, travel and invest. I live frugally. I really wanted to return to writing from the beginning but I had two children to raise.

Holder: You are a small press activist. You are also friends with small press icon Harry Smith?

Smith: I love the small press. Harry Smith is a very significant figure. He was a giant at the time when he took me in. A big reason we have the small press is because of people like Smith. Smith felt there had to be a place for independent thinking. He published folks like Studs Terkel—a whole host of writers who were published under “The Smith” press.

Holder: What did Smith do for you?

Smith: He published me in an anthology: "Eleven Young Poets.” On the back of the book he wrote: “Will poets conquer the world?” He published an epic poem of mine: “Song of the Blood.” That was the first book I had published (1983) It lead to a number of interviews (NPR) and parts were adapted for a modern dance at Lincoln Center. Smith is a monster intellect. He graduated Brown University. He is a great believer in democratic ideals. He was a voice of Greenwich Village.

Holder: Are there any folks like Smith out there, like Eric Greinke of Presa Press?

Smith: Greinke has a press in the 70’s “The Pilot Press.” He published some amazing poets like Denise Levertov, Robert Bly—he knew all these people. But like me, for whatever reason, he dropped out of the publishing scene for 15 years. Then he started publishing again. He started Presa press to remind today’s young poets of what Avant-Garde poetry was in the 70’s and 80’s. He wanted to remind people of Lyn Lifshin, Harry Smith and others.

Holder; Any advice for novice poets out there?

Smith: Keep learning. Try on new things. If you don’t the magic will die for you. Remember the excitement of creation—don’t get stale.

--Doug Holder

Errol Lincoln Uys: From James Michener to "Brazil"

Errol Lincoln Uys: From James Michener to "Brazil"

Interview with Doug Holder



Errol Lincoln Uys is the author of the novel “Brazil,” “Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move in the Great Depression”, and many other works. Born in South Africa, Uys has been a journalist, International Editor for Reader’s Digest, as well as a salesman, law school dropout, and youthful vagabond. Uys, who was a featured reader in The Somerville News Writers Festival last November (2007), worked with the renowned writer James Michener on his novel about South Africa: “The Covenant.” I talked with Uys on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: The English poet Philip Larkin wrote: “It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable.” Yes, despite your hardscrabble background you wrote your first article in the Johannesburg Star: “ Happiness Is An Unprejudiced Mind.”

Was this hard to write in light of your early life?

Errol Uys: It was fairly difficult growing up in South Africa. I was the only child of divorced parents. I dropped out of law school. I tried to start a business that was a total catastrophe. I was going to make cane furniture of all things. Don’t ask why! I used to sell things early on. I sold Hula-Hoops in the streets of Johannesburg. I also sold Teddy Bears. Throughout this time I had always been writing. By this point I had written two unpublished novels. I was living in an apartment that was infested with roaches. So here I was with absolutely nothing. I saw a small ad in the Johannesburg Star that read: “ Apply for a job as a journalist.” I gave the Star a manuscript I had written. In those days you didn’t need a M.A. in Journalism. I was lucky. I got a job at the Star. They sent me to a “cadet” school. This was a fantastic way to learn to be a reporter. While I was waiting to go to school I wrote this article” Happiness Is An Unprejudiced Mind.” And I got it published on the editorial page. So that’s the way to get started through happiness! But I always have had a real feeling for the underdog.

When I worked for the Star it was during the 1960’s, and it was a very volatile time in Johannesburg. It was an exciting time to be writing.

DH: When you were very young you “hit the road” and hitchhiked around South Africa. Did Kerouac influence you?

EU: No, not really. Later when I wrote, “Riding the Rails,” I had obviously read Kerouac. In those days I was just a 15-year-old kid out to see his country. I have been lucky since then. I have traveled all over the world professionally and personally.

DH: So many writers from Crane to Hemingway have gotten their start as journalists. Is working as a journalist a good training ground to be a writer of fiction and nonfiction?


EU: It is and it isn’t. There are two schools of thought. From journalism to nonfiction there should be no drawback. To go to fiction there is something of the muse that might be affected. What you have to keep alive in that transition is spirit. That magic and enthusiasm.

DH: You worked closely with James Michener on one of his sprawling historical novels “The Covenant” You did a huge amount of work: research, editing, and writing. Yet you say he failed to acknowledge you as a coauthor. Why?

EU: I remember I said to Michener when we were working on ‘The Covenant,” “ Hey look, you might want to take a look at this and possibly use it.” He took what I gave him, closed the door, and I heard him type it up.

Someone said he really couldn’t acknowledge me on a collaborative level. Publishers back then would not put up with it. On the front page of the book there is an acknowledgement that I read the manuscript over seven times with him for errors. Today there would be no question about a full acknowledgement.

DH: Michener was obviously prolific and famous. Do you think he was a good writer?

EU: He was a brilliant researcher. He was great at blending fact and fiction. He criticized my work as being too “novelistic.” To me this is great praise. It is hard to criticize his work. His characters are very different from literary-driven ones. His is a huge tapestry. I feel the characters in my historical novel “Brazil” are more fully fleshed than his.

He has an enormous following. Especially amongst the older generation. Books like “The Source” were highly respected. Today the idea of these huge novels is combated by the Internet, and the byte world. Whether he stands among the literary greats is questionable. Remember though he won the Pulitzer for “South Pacific.” That is a work apart from the rest of his writing.

DH: You authored a book “Brazil” that spawned five centuries and two fictional families. Why would a South African take up a country like Brazil?

EU: After working with Michener I had to do my own historical novel. Having come from South Africa to the United States in the 1970’s when the whole racial thing was exploding, I became interested in comparing the two countries. I wondered how did these two countries develop? How did the racial climate in Brazil become so different from South Africa? Coming to live in America I realized how little people new about Brazil. It was amazing. They are our neighbors to the South.

DH: Tell me how you came to write, “Riding the Rails,” your book about the Great Depression, and the teenagers who hopped boxcars traveling the country looking for work. Was it partially due to your wanderlust as a kid?


EU: Partially. I was doing research on the Great Depression era, when I came across this book by Thomas Minehan. Minehan was a sociologist. Minehan rode the rails with the kids who rode the boxcars. My son and daughter-in-law had just finished film school at N.Y.U. I said the subject would make a great documentary. The essentially filmed the documentary for “The American Experience” on PBS. I wrote the companion volume.

DH: What are you working on now?

EU: I am going to write a book about Boston. It is going to be about Irish immigration in the 1840’s. The population of Boston during this period went from 100,000 to 135,000. 35,000 were Irish. Can you imagine what Boston was like? What the waterfront where the Irish lived was like? Thousands and thousands of penniless immigrants came here. Yet writers like Emerson and Thoreau and the rest have barely mentioned them. And when they did in the most stereotypical way. This will be a much smaller and compact novel than “Brazil.” I want to examine the relationships between the Irish and the Beacon Hill Protestant elites.

DH: Can you tell me about your trove of Michener papers?

EU: I put all the Michener papers on my website. I want to make sure the papers get to the right places. I kept everything. For some reason something told me to keep all those drafts of the Michener book. They are all in binders.

for more information on Uys go to: www.erroluys.com

--Doug Holder

Blue Ribbons at the County Fair. Ellaraine Lockie

Blue Ribbons at the County Fair. Ellaraine Lockie. ( PWJ Publishing POBOX 238 Tahoma, CA. 96090) http://www.wellinghamjones.com $10.

Ellaraine Lockie is a well-known and respected poet in the big world of the small press. She has been nominated for Pushcarts numerous times, and has a plethora of publication credits on her long resume. This California poet’s latest collection is “ Blue Ribbons at the Country Fair.” Lockie writes about her conflicted relationship with her religion, infidelity, and her early years in the hinterlands of Montana, to name a few subjects.

Lockie is a keen observer of human character—its many flaws, warts; and is unafraid to put a bright light on her own. Being a cat lover, and the owner of a frisky feline MENOW, I enjoyed Lockie’s poetic tribute to her cat “ Cat In Her Empty Nest”
Here her cat replaces a daughter who left the familial nest. Lockie showers as much love on the scamp as she would a child or her child as in the case here:

“ He laps up baby talk
Caresses
Kisses
All my mother smother
A symbiotic pair
Only I can feed him
Groom him…

In return he muzzles
Purrs
Lap dances into my void…”

And in “Man About Town” Lockie notices an attractive down-at-the-heels man partaking in a buffet at a garbage bin:

“ Black leather blazer
Body cigar-straight blue jeans
tucked into boots
Dark hair growing out of his halfway
unbuttoned tan shirt
Two-day stubble and longhair look
Of a GQ model

Five sips of coffee later I look up
And he’s ransacking
the four trash cans out front
Toasting other people’s excesses
with paper cups
In moves as fluid as the lattes
chai and chocolate milks
that slide down his throat
He’s become a fine wine connoisseur
Who couldn’t be bothered to replace
hiking boots with soles wallet-thin
Whose domestic help forgot to hem
The lining that hangs below black leather…”

Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Wilderness House Literary Review Edited by Gloria Mindock

Wilderness House Literary Review
Edited by Gloria Mindock
ISBN 978-0-6151-6265-2
248 page anthology at 24.95 paperback
ISCS Press
145 Foster Street
Littleton MA 01460

According to the book’s Forward, the Wilderness House Literary Review began as a collaboration between a group of poets and writers -- the Bagel Bards -- and the Wilderness House Literary Retreat in Littleton MA. Edited by Gloria Mindock of Cervena Barva Press and presenting the work of seventy writers, poets, and artists, this anthology is excellent in every way. Readers will recognize many of the names included in this anthology because of their frequent contributions to literature and the arts in journals and e-zines.

Poetry contributions include ekphrasis -- poetry inspired by viewing art -- and word explorations, free form, post-modern, and translations. Prose includes fiction and non fiction, social commentaries, essays, letters and novel excerpts. Readers will find here what writers and poets do best: provide humor in times of trial; lighten the burdens of everyday life through imaginative prose; create order out of chaos through well-constructed words and cadences; and shine an illuminating light on the good and bad we see around us.

This anthology represents the work of talented editors, writers, poets and artists who are “like the flash of fireflies that burst into view…” Each page is a new adventure, encouraging, uplifting, informing or intriguing the reader. This sampling from many gifted writers is top notch and highly recommended.

Review by Laurel Johnson for Midwest Book Review

FROM SOMERVILLE TO THE BOWERY by Doug Holder

FROM SOMERVILLE TO THE BOWERY

By Doug Holder

No matter where you go Somerville is not far behind. I found on my recent literary related trip to NYC all kinds of Somerville connections. I had planned to visit my mother in New York the first weekend in February, and it just so happened that poet Charles Ries from Wisconsin was reading at the KGB bar in the Bowery and he invited me and other folks to attend. Charles was attending the “Association of Writer’s & Writing Programs” conference in NYC. It was held on 52nd St. at the Sheraton so I figured I would make a pit stop there. Unfortunately you have to register to get in, and they were booked, so I was unable to attend the book fair segment. You figure they would let the general public in for the book tables. As a publisher/poet I would want as many folks as possible to be exposed to my books, not just our arcane world of small press people. But being the small press guerilla that I am to the bone, I left “Ibbetson Street” magazines strategically appointed around the lobby. Hopefully they got a receptive audience… a literary minded bellboy, or perhaps a luminary like Sue Miller picked it up in an afterthought.

Interesting enough earlier that day I received an email from a British poet Eva Salzman, who was a good friend of the late Poet Sarah Hannah, an acquaintance of mine who committed suicide last spring. She wrote me that she saw the interview I conducted on “Somerville Community Access TV” with Sarah, and was going to excerpt it in the current issue of “Dark Horse” a well-regarded literary magazine in Scotland. She told me she wrote an essay about Hannah.

After this, inspired by Kazan’s “A Walker In The City” I walked in the rain from 52nd Street to 4th Street in the Bowery. I was surprised what this 52-year-old body can do when inspired. The city is a source of constant fascination: the ancient tenements amidst the eruption of post-modern edifices, the unexpected arcane little shops, the dark mystery of gone-to seed Irish pubs, the protrusion of plantains from street side Bodegas, and the cacophony of Salsa, and car horns. Charles Simic our new poet/laureate wrote that while walking the city streets many years ago he tried to help find a pearl lost in the gutter for a tearful woman. He never found it but still looks for it after all these years. Needless to say a poem was birthed from this. There were no pearls before this swine however on this trip.

Anyway when I hit the Bowery for some reason Sarah Hannah’s name came up in my head. During my walk I came across the Bowery Poetry Club. So like a dog (one with a Somerville-pedigree, mind you) on a meat truck I rushed in. I ran into Jim Kates the founder of the Zephyr Press (founded in Somerville) and he introduced me to a young poet from Somerville. We chatted and I gave her a copy of “Ibbetson Street” that had an interview with Hannah. It turns out she was a student of Hannah’s at Emerson College, and loved her as a teacher and person, as many did.

Later I spoke to a young man from the famed avant-garde small press “New Directions” founded by the late James Laughlin. One of our first books “The Life of All Worlds” by Marc Widershien had a blurb from Laughlin.

The KGB bar was a down –at-the heels, hole-in-the wall, and a perfect spot for a reading. It really did have a lot of boheme charm. In the two hours I was there I got to talk to Charles Ries, I met the publisher of the “Mad Hatter’s Review,” a freshly-minted MFA student from the south coast of Florida, Michael Ditusa, and a professor of Literature from Miami University in Ohio.

What a crowd, a lot of hip young poets. And although I am married I am not blind, and some were not only talented but quite striking in other ways as well.

The next day I had the chance to meet my brother Donald Holder and my mother for dinner. Don is a Broadway lighting designer and he told me he is going to be working on a revival of “South Pacific” by James Michener. Just the other day I interviewed on Somerville Community Access TV Errol Uys, the author of “Brazil” who worked extensively with Michener . Hopefully the two will talk soon.

On the Greyhound back to Boston I ran into my neighbors Tam Lin Neville and Bert Stern. Tam and Bert are Somerville poets and publishers (“Off the Grid Press”), and we talked shop and talked “Somerville” One from this talented couple will be reading at the Somerville News Writers Festival.

So from start to end Somerville was present on my trip. Just goes to show what a great literary community we live in, and it has legs, man!

A Handful of Bees" Poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky

"A Handful of Bees" Poems by Dzvinia Orlowsky

Carnegie Mellon University Press 1994

A Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary 2008

Copyright © 1994 by Dzvinia Orlowsky

ISBN 978-0-8748-485-8



Review by Mike Amado



Recently, I read on the website, "the drunken boat .com" an introduction by

Dzvinia on her poems published there. The on-line pieces bring to light

Mrs. Orlowsky’s ordeal with breast cancer, but more importantly, recovery

and survival. I quote from that intro:



"I recall, after completing my 6 months of chemo treatment, the utterly strange sensation of crying into my goggles as I swam laps. Moments of helplessness coupled with moments of great faith and resolve. One eye laughs while the other weeps. Poetry, thank God, allows that—it makes room for all of that, for all of us."



This very thesis is also the lode stone of "A Handful of Bees".

Originally published in1994 by Carnegie Mellon University Press,

this book has been republished as a classic by Carnegie Mellon and

is truly a classic. The collection embarks with poems reflecting

on the passing of Mrs. Orlowsky’s father ( to whom the book is dedicated).

Orlowsky raises the tragedy of losing a parent to a universal plane that’s

both earnest and cathartic, where, even simple belongings of the deceased are

imbued with power and testimony. In "Barn Lumber", both speaker and mother of

the speaker feel a commingled remembrance of the father through regular objects

that the he himself has made:



"I understand now, these reminders she keeps.

One, a barn lumber table

on which she burns a hurricane lamp.

Another, a rifle propped

against the window of her bedroom,

bulletless, but labeled with tape

marked ‘dangerous.’"



There is a thread of sadness that plaits its way through this volume.

Even through the poems on life with immigrant parents, there is a stark,

visible yearning. The world of home and the world outside and

the conflict of the two to coexist. A situation that many Americans

of any given ethnicity can immediately grasp. "First Generation" starts off:





"It was good to be first at something

even if it meant parents

who by speaking

shut out the world

except for my sister, and me

and Bimko, our dog,

who understood bilingual commands."

Imagery in "A Handful of Bees" is never random, but lucid, in the moment like

hot glass forged into a sharp gem. In "To Our Cosmeticians", Orlowsky examines

with knowing clarity the disparate perceptions of women.

(She defines the "Before Woman" in this poem as having, " . . .no lips to speak of",

and the "After Woman" as being, ". . .known to bite.") Ultimately, the speaker declares:



"If you ask me what season I am,

I would say late fall -

just at the time

when trees give up

and drop their leaves."



"A Handful of Bees" is immediately personal, international, and, filtered through

the prism of the heart, these poems come forth universally. Dzvinia Orlowsky

films a screenplay for the intuition. In just this one volume of sixty one pages

she undefeatedly answers as many life questions as she has conjured.

With stealth, imparting the reader a sense of "being there" in the human condition.


Mike Amado/ Ibbetson Update/ 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

Actor's Shakespeare Project Review

ACTOR’S SHAKESPEARE PROJECT CONVERSATIONS

Henry V conversations: What is a Just War?

An Evening of Scenes from ASP’s Henry V with Responses

In the Basement of the Harvard Square Garage

January 28, 2008

A Review by Lo Galluccio of Ibbetson St. Press/The Alewife

Coordinated by Coppelia Kahn, including panel members:

Diana Henderson, Fred Marchant, Normi Noel and James Siemon.

"Henry V" conversations: What is a Just War was the fifth in a series of remarkable discussions that Ben Evett (Artistic Director) and Bobbie Steinbach (Company member) have put together to achieve a community response that expands upon Shakespeare’s themes and show their relevance to modern times.

I last attended and wrote on, “Entertaining Violence” a forum tied in to a marvelous all-male production of “Titus Andronicus.” ASP should be given credit not only for a top-notch acting company but for ingenious marketing, grant endowments and a genuine desire to give money and intellectual capital back to the community

So it was that on the evening of George Bush’s last State of the Union address, an avid audience of about 60 gathered at the performance space of ASP in the bottom of the Garage in Harvard Square. Opting out of the President’s final major speech of his at best controversial career in office – one marked by a costly and unpopular War in Iraq -- the fans of this theatre troupe settled in to watch three scenes from the production and to hear a distinguished panel talk about Shakespeare and issues of warfare. While I feel strongly that the first topic was discussed fiercely and elegantly, I came away wondering why the main question of the evening had gotten a bit lost in the shuffle of eloquence and intellect. I really wanted to hear a rousing discourse on the subject of a Just War, some typology, some philosophical or humane resolve. What better time, I thought, making my way through the holiday lights and snowy streets of Mass Avenue to discuss this issue, than now?

Not only are we $530 billion dollars in debt to a war that is being fought mainly by poor, rural men with few options, we’ve succeeded in an evolution of war devices/terminology that suggest an even colder and possibly more brutal, detached and inhumane way of dealing with our war, than before. We now call civilian deaths,”collateral damage, ““Water boarding” (a form of torture used against those suspected of terrorism, and many believe in violation of the Geneva Convention) was discussed for weeks on NPR recently in connection to the FBI’s “War on Terror.” And, of course we have seen the inception and rise of suicide bombers/bombing unprecedented in history. The latter is not an invention of the Iraq invasion, but certainly given the disturbing justification for this War—the doomsday destruction against U.S. Capitalism we call 9/11-- suicide bombing is on the rise as both cause and consequence. One example of this is the recent assassination of Opposition Party candidate Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan on the eve of elections there by another young suicide bomber. The fact is we have, what several of the academic panelists called, a “surround” to this subject which is reality-based and not entirely embedded in the various interpretations of text or acting of Henry V which penetrated the evening most, though that is the groundwork from which we this event started. Shakespeare’s prism of language, perspective and context was the guiding light.

This panel was as exciting and informational as the last – Diana Henderson added animated conceptualizations of the scenes in historical terms, Fred Marchant, equally astute lent his a poetic ear to the proceedings, also a former marine who was given a conscientious leave after Okinawa (though he didn’t speak much about this.) The play’s director, Normi Noel, spoke humbly and provocatively of what a patriarchal war drive can do to twist and denude young men of their hearts and James Siemon, a Professor of English at BU, contributed many keen philosophical observations. The evening was moderated by Coppelia Kahn who is poised to become the incoming President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She introduced each scene and led the discussion with a cool and even-handed approach, adding a theoretical context to the evening.

The first hint of discussing war’s brutality came as several panelists used the term “atrocity,” after the enactment of Henry threatening a village in France with complete annihilation unless they succumbed to his forceful verbal “battering ram” to disarm. Coppelia then invoked a paradigm of Henry V which described its duality or Janus-faced nature – that is either to interpret it as the rise of a warrior King who wins, or the rise of a Machiavellian King who deceives and pillages for the sake of power. Both seem to work depending on one’s point of reference. And it was only at the tail end of the evening that the panelists acknowledged that Henry V calls for the killing of prisoners three times during the play. This other brutality seemed a significant detail, not to be overlooked in making a judgment of whether this or other wars constitute a grave injustice against humanity.

As always Shakespeare beguiles and entertains us with his pitched language and the subtle interplay of the intimate and epic: i.e., relations between a man and woman (who happen to be rival monarchs) in the famous “courtship” scene of Katherine of France or the King’s incognito meeting with his subjects in a dark wood on watch where they debate what they actually do owe this King as they are lead into bloody battle. It is against these specific, human moments that we experience the larger forces of a looming nationalism, tribalism and vengeful warfare that have marked thousands of years of history. In acknowledging Shakespeare’s own humanity, do we then make an assessment that because humans have consciences and can fathom issues of justice, there may be both Just and unjust wars? Are we able then to make judgments without some sort of God-like referee about this play or the current war in Iraq? And I had to ask myself-- wasn’t that the question posed for us to somehow answer.

I would have liked the topic explored in more concrete terms, without the heavy gloss on this particular play, its wonderfully acted scenes, and the high-brow panel. It would have given the evening a bit more grit and purpose; however, the aura of academia and the emphasis on the drama held sway during the night. And that was probably as it should be, given that the production was its centerpiece.

Some noteworthy remarks emerged from the audience (finally unleashed) at the evening’s finale. One British soldier in the audience, who’d been stationed in Afghanistan, spoke robustly of how well the war was going and how important Henry V had been to him in the field. I countered by questioning his extreme patriotism for the US at time when, to many minds, we were, in fact involved in an unwarranted war, started by a leader many consider to be inadequate, if not immoral in its undertaking. At another juncture, a young woman described a scene in Iraq that her friend in arms relayed, of men being whipped into a killing frenzy. This she related back to Henry V’s desire to kill. Another woman gave a feminist review of the “wooing” scene, remarking that Hal may have put the charm on, but Katherine was still but a pawn in his game. I could have used a bit more of a controlled free-for-all, so the audience had a chance to present their reactions and views as much as the panel – to let it rip, so to speak. Still, the evening gave a richly balanced discourse.

I urge you to go see Henry V and to support Actor’s Shakespeare Project’s ongoing evolution. Tell them next time they have an audience feedback event, to stay on track with the question of the night and to let the talk fly a bit more. We may be in Harvard-land but that doesn’t mean that academic theory must dominate the landscape of Shakespeare’s garden of beautiful and brutal delights.

Winners and Honorable Mentions from Reuben Rose Poetry Award--2007

( Voices Israel memebers Netanya, Israel)



Here are the winning and honorable mention poetry selections for the Rueben Rose Poetry Award 2007 ( sponsored by "Voices Israel") which I had the pleasure to judge--Doug Holder




Fish Eye by Zvi A. Sesling 1st Prize


Once, in the home of a Filipino, I was
served soup with the head of a fish
floating in the middle, the eye staring
up, the same as in a pile of the dead at
Auschwitz, the center of the eye forming
a question mark asking, Why me? Why am
I here? What have I done to earn this infamous
plight? The eye doesn't see, yet it tells
of surprise, shock, fear, anguish and pain,
not love, happiness or humor.
The eye has seen too much, not enough.
Questions are answered, question remain.
In the end humanity
consumes fish, consumes humanity.



Paris Unsaid by Celia Merlin 2nd Prize


I sent my boys off to Paris today.
Twenty-two and twenty,
the same age as I,
when captured by
the Seine's rainbow twinkle,
Elysees' grandeur.
They are cynically young, from
press keys and wires,
with gadgets literally
out of their ears.
They will turn the same corners,
eat the same bread;
their boundless dreams ,
though well-hidden,
as green as mine at that time.
Anxiously I wait to see how they fared
away from their text message world.
Will they feel autumn slide through
the narrow back alleys?
Will they smell lovers' sighs in small dim cafes?
Will their sneakered feet remember
the cobblestone, worn and uneven
from horses past and sports cars present?
Will they tell of glances and blushing
and wet autumn leaves and cool white marble,
of ponds, round and shallow with toy boats that float
as children jump past with their plaid woven scarves and
their small yapping dogs?
I have walked them to school-
these two young men.
I have taught them to swim and to drive.
But I can't help but wonder and worry a bit-
have I taught them to hear what's unsaid?




72 VIRGINS by Reuven Goldfarb, 3rd Prize

--an arrow in the heart of the Intifada--

"Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
a paradise for a sect…."
Keats, "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream"

When you complete your mission
and arrive in the place of Judgment,
you will be greeted
by seventy-two beautiful virgins
who won't like you.

They'll talk only to each other,
form hostile little cabals,
engage in whispering campaigns
to discuss your every earthly peccadillo,
and, most of all, mock your ambition
to be honored as a martyr.

No martyr, they will say, ever won his crown
by murdering innocent people
You lost your life in vain.




Poem by Wendy Blumfield 4th Prize


PASSIONS By Wendy Blumfield



The music teacher said sing silently
And not to let my voice`s passion soar to the sky
A voice that held no tune.
The dancing teacher said go home you are a waste of space
As in passion arms reach to the sky
And my plump overweight little legs march on.
My grandfather gave me a little wooden desk
And I wrote my passions in ink
That stained my fingers and spilt down my white school blouse.
God gave me four children
And I fed them with passion
From those plump overweight breasts
Sang them to sleep with the passion
Of my voice that held no tune
And danced with them with passion
through the autumn leaves
And the joy of the windswept beach.



Honorary Mention


MY FATHER'S ANKLES by Donna Bechar


Fine-boned like a thoroughbred's
With the grace of a gazelle and a cheetah's speed
Quick as clippers in a barber's hand
Svelte as the quiet of snowfall on velvet
Flying across the backyard lawn like
A magician's sleight of hand
Bidding many farewells and leaving awe
In their wake and wonder as their legacy
These were my father's ankles of yesteryear
These days, the gas pedal carries him
Speedily to his destinations
Replacing those chiseled contours
Now swollen beyond recognition
His legs are maps of torn-down byways
And too-narrow highways
Preventing the traffic of blood and fluids
Their fluidity and refuge, instead
Bottlenecking, slow passage and nowhere to go
Propped up on sofa cushions while watching tv
In their inertia and repose, I see through time
To when they were ready for action in an instant
I see them when they were like spinning tops
Dizzying in games of tag, softball and soccer
Becoming fins in our swimming pool
Becoming wings in an over-the-fence leap
And for fleeting instances, I think I see them
Wink as they leave a trail of mischievous
Triumphant laughter
Today, my father's ankles can manage a sweet nostalgic smile
As they plod like grounded mortals
But I keep seeing them in their Olympic form




Two Zinnias by Helen Bar-Lev, honorary mention


Two zinnias in a glazed vase
clipped by nuns' careful scissors,
are the only decoration in this spartan room
in a convent in Jerusalem
but it is clean, the mattress comfortable
flagstone floors, yellow- and red-ochre,
have been polished to a gleam by passing shoes
these one hundred years, even more
We have returned to Jerusalem
after an absence of some months –
a jittery city, it is more intolerable than ever
horns constantly honk, faces do not smile
congestion and pollution, agitation,
congregate in its centre
together with beggars,
street musicians, religious Jews, Arabs
an incongruent conglomeration
which beckons in a manner I cannot fathom
and repulses with vengeance,
as though one reaction triggers its opposite,
a contradiction of emotions
that is disturbing considering I lived here
for so long and loved it with passion,
wrote love poems in dedication,
painted its landscapes from every angle
until my ability wilted and the brush
could no longer respond to my commands
So that earlier today when I walked
through this city in the heat of its summer
and watched dusk extinguish the gold from its stones,
I noticed a nostalgia for it – for the once-Jerusalem,
almost expecting the present
to disappear behind a curtain
and lo! enter the Jerusalem of old,
the city I knew and yearned to return to,
smaller, happier, more beautiful
These are my thoughts now, late,
in this sanctuary amidst the city's insanity,
this secluded quaint convent,
where quail and jay and gay flowers reside,
whose energies are lovely, light,
a place that does not disturb
nor disappoint my memories
While the two zinnias in the vase
blink red and pink
in the heat of the night
and soothe me





Some Things, You Just Have to Learn For Yourself

by David Silverman, Israel, honorary mention



The doctors must have thought we couldn't take it,
because they didn't tell us what we needed to know.
Or else they didn't know themselves. We figured it
out, though, on our own. Cancer gets a kick out of
pulling the covers off late at night. Cancer has a bad
attitude and doesn't play well with others. Cancer is
a sliver of glass that disappears into the fleshy part of
your foot. Cancer is burnt toast, moldy fruit, the wine
that's turned. Cancer is the job that should have been
yours, but went to that idiot in Sales. Cancer is a wet
knot in your shoelace, a size 17 neck in a size 16 shirt.
Cancer is termites in the wall, a pregnant rat in the attic.
Cancer is a dead battery on the coldest day of the year.
Cancer is an airball, a fourth quarter fumble, a called third
strike with the bases full. Cancer is a migratory bird,
minding its own business, sucked into the engine of a
jumbo jet. Cancer is the unexpected thunderclap overhead
and the storm you thought was miles away, is here.



BIG GREEN GARDEN by Rena Navon, honorary mention


With a simple tool, our patient, steady gardener
cuts out shadows and insinuates some sunny plants.
Accomplice, sharp blades snip away the marginalia.
Mesmerized by shaded head and sun-glassed focus
balancing

I marvel how his suntanned hands don't make a sound
that doesn't satisfy the purpose of his metal sheers.
Ignoring all distractions as he cuts away the ugly edges,
this worker's so in tune with good performance as the blades
slide smoothly, my questions lose their meaning. Eyes ascend,
together with the green material he is harvesting away.
*
Aspiring to give some form and meaning too,
I was sitting and writing and rewriting,
forgetting how to do it like other artists do.
With my attention in his hands, he keeps cutting
away lines before I get to write them down.
I fail as a hypnotic patient fails to act.
*
As long as a magician in my garden
monopolizes my natural view,
will it take all day
to finish up this poem?


Cowardly Cur!
Battlefield deserter!
Once you were my brave young boy
battering the gates of mighty Troy
marching in a vast crusade
licking loving getting laid
bending heaven to her knees.
Your bulging blade however embarrassed me
standing up in church and school
waiving that defiant tool
in front of my red face.
I smacked it with a stick to keep that prick in place.
We were best of friends
but in the end you stretched too far and I lost everything:
wives kids house jobs.
Now a gross belly droops across my belt.
It's a blinding piece of meat.
When I aim for the stars I piss on my feet.
The ultimate joke and ultimate rule
is every man's a god damned fool.
Old time warriors weary of this fate.
They sit and plot the end of days
then viciously hallucinate.
Rise up my dying dick and rally to the throne
and I will fight my way to hell and back
loyal to the bone.
Wouldn't that be biblical
you and I
to ride into the holy wars and never die.



Counting… by Rena Navon honorary mention


The sky, high taut umbrella, begins to close
around this farmhouse for another country night.
Cleaved feet of sheep get torn from pasture.
I beat an echo to their injured bleating;
my pleading eye skims the flock until the last one
is behind the wall of straw….
When will I realize counting lambs white as rich
sunshine, at the shore of my even white pillow?
Where my brethren lie, are there meadows more?
Abide there in your beauty, Disheveled Eternity,
before stored rain I was amply spared all of my life
comes crashing down on me with all of its might.



Little Departures by Elisheva Gal, honorary mention


One commences with trifles like,
let's say, a single farewell a day,
one small, insignificant departure
so as not to create
an abrupt colossal deficiency
tomorrow.
One may, for example, depart
from the glitter in the eye
one day,
from the elasticity of the figure
another.
Then – from the little coffee shop,
the old school, the beach,
from the lounge furniture set,
the crammed bookcase
and favourite weekly magazine
of so many years.
Last, one says goodbye
to all those who are dearest
one by one
Bidding farewell by installments
makes it less difficult,
in fact it's quite sensible.
At the very end one says goodbye
to sorrow.



THE CHILLED TREE by Rena Navon, honorary mention

Day's vulnerable colors don't collapse
until the last tree chills along with the rest.
The day-old sun drops and bleeds
ashamedly under the swollen ground.
A woman turning toward her weak left side
has given up on the indomitable right, "predictable"
as an ocean tide. Delivering life's waters into earth's aging arms,
she ends by hiding her wrinkling hands under the shade.


As the last light gets doused, the woman's neighbors
distract her by examining the planets: "See?
The problem is far away, way out there," a hand pointed
like a brim lowered to keep the circulating truth away.
When their husbands went off to war, serialized weapons lifted,
a wife shared a pact never to cry before the funeral
as if they could not accept that death will come.
Uniform faces resist any tear and a small,
withdrawn faith holds their old belief dear.
*
The evening colors are thinning together into the dirt.
Ancient wisdom dribbles down their long necks,
darkening their hard nipples staring like cut stones
through shirts hanging down to their soggy moccasins.
Life's witnesses disqualified such a matriarch with her pains
as profound as the green, writhing moon long ago.
Does this trooper receive more than a premonition of death
before hard-metal turns into its red, liquid opposite?
Is that ball buried under a chilled tree the last sun?



the bone by Rena Navon, honorary mention

I used to force past loves to dream
back to me, their slippery hands
as open as the ocean, fingers
numbering greater than ravenous
fish. But diving has taught me since
that their pretty, lustrous orange cover
seems, not is I only saw it from one
side of the sea's latitudinal posture.
Now I wait, watching for them to swallow
bait and get served by willing waiters at
tables set with elegant glasses and able
tools to turn their scaled bodies into meals.
Their spiny substance is but a nuisance we
remove like surgeons careful not to swallow
bones on the shore of inhaling-bliss,
enjoying the food time has made of them.

LIVING IN STORMS. Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression. Edited by Thom Schramm.

LIVING IN STORMS. Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression. Edited by Thom Schramm. (Eastern Washington University Press Spokane, Washington 2008) $24.

The “black dogs” of depression are never far outside our gate, as Winston Churchill once wrote. The euphoria of mania and the freefall of depression are known in the field as “manic depression.” This rapid cycling tornado of mental illness has affected (according to recent studies) poets and writers to a greater degree than the general population. In fact in the New York Times awhile back it was reported that poets and writers, and particularly poets, have a shorter lifespan than the rest of the masses. Could it be we are more prone to suicide or have we just forgotten to take our daily dose of statins?

Having worked at the renowned Boston-area psychiatric hospital: McLean Hospital for the past twenty-five years, I have witnessed mental illness in all its infinite variety, from the locked ward to the outpatient milieu. McLean Hospital itself has a history of “thoroughbred mental cases” as Robert Lowell put it in his poem: “Waking In The Blue.” (A poem that is set at Bowditch Hall at McLean where I worked for a number of years.) Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and I am told John Berryman have been hospitalized at McLean. Anne Sexton ran her famed poetry workshops on grounds and later was treated on the locked ward for a short period. A friend of mine who was a counselor on the ward she was housed on asked Sexton why she always wore sunglasses indoors. She replied, “ Because I am a poet of course.” I have also interviewed the social worker to Plath and Sexton: Lois Ames. Ames is a poet in her own right and wrote the introduction to Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar.” And more than this, I have been treated for depression myself. And as a poet, I can tell you there is nothing romantic or poetic about depression and mental illness. And if you have been through it, even if it has given you some good material, you wish that it never would rear its ugly head again. Unfortunately, especially among some younger poets, the “Mad” poet has been lionized, and drug and alcohol abuse viewed as necessary as a laptop or pen or pencil in the writers’ life. I say it ain’t so..

So when the distinguished Boston University professor and poet Tino Villanueva handed me “Living In Storms”, (at a meeting of the Boston-area writers’ group the “Bagel Bards,”) a collection of poetry having to do with contemporary poets whose lives have been some way touched by manic depression, I was intrigued.

And perhaps there is something about our dark natures that lends itself to art. In the foreword to the collection David Wojan quotes one of my favorite poets Philip Larkin:

“Happiness writes white. It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is the source of my popularity, if I have any—after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?”

I was happy to find in this collection that there were many poets I have read with, booked for events, interviewed, etc… over the years like: Lyn Lifshin, Daniel Hoffman, Robert Pinsky, Steve Cramer, and of course Tino Villanueva.

I think the poems in this collection capture the true tragedy of the illness through art not clinical reportage. The poems here capture the maw of the depression; with the poets’ struggle with his or her self, the world-at-large; the claustrophobic tunnel vision, with no light in sight. And it also covers the sizzle and no steak that takes the poet racing to the heights, only to drop like a dead weight.

Hayden Carruth in his poem “ Depression,” captures the relentless cycles of nature, and depression itself:

“ We have tried hard, have labored against the seasons/ like the geese, year after year, against mania, fear, / depression, death in the heart/ the endless mockery/of the children in our minds, we have hurled fat insults/ at each other/ have hurled silence, the same/occult and cloudy words over and over in the wet/ wind, we have persisted, tattered and worn out/ and sorry. / Thank God we love each other and can hold/ our tongues and go to bed, otherwise this/would be intolerable, traveling so far, so long, and never/
Arriving anywhere. Nor do the geese. / Nor the seasons.”

And in Tino Villanueva’s poem “Shaking Off the Dark” Villanueva, like a dyed-in-the-wool pugilist fights through the tight wrap of darkness.

“Distraught,
mad-eyed from told formulas
bound to rule my easy ways,
I look, I see,
but fail once more to know.
Such rites of life
can waste the wit;
can be like strictures
rushing to the head.
Mine is a palpable body
that cannot stand itself.

Yet, a rebellion overtakes the mind
the kind that breaks the shadow’s hold:
I ram a fist into the howl of the wind,
shake off the dark locked
within the hell of these rare depths.
The common street
and shifting sky become a song.”

Also in this collection are poems by William Matthews, Jane Kenyon, Liz Rosenberg, C.K. Williams, Leo Connellan, and many others.

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008

Two New Reviews: " All the Meals I Had Before," and "No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain" by Doug Holder

These reviews are in the Winter 2007/8 edition of The Main Street Rag.... http://mainstreetrag.com



OF All THE MEALS I HAD BEFORE: POEMS ABOUT FOOD AND EATING
By Doug Holder
Cervena Barva Press ( 2007) 23 pages $7.
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com

NO ONE DIES AT THE AU BON PAIN
By Doug Holder
Sunnyoutside (2007) 28 pages $8
ISBN 1-934513008, Poetry
http://sunnyoutside.com

Aside from being the founder, publisher, and co-editor of the prestigious and influential Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder writes poetry with a passion and insight that deserves prestige and influence all its own.

Take, for instance, “Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating,” a work with an organic feel surprising for a chapbook. Among some odes to nostalgic eateries like “Last Night at the Wursthaus” and “At Benson’s Deli,” Holder ponders the silly—“Milk Duds”—and the sublime—“Portrait of My Mother During Her Solitary Meal.” His eye for the rattling image drives many of the poems, like “Eating Out” where he observes: “As the Latino/scrapes the masticated/bone and marrow/into a bloody bin/ and flashes a gold-toothed smile,/at the chef/ whose cleaver/tears through a prime cut--/then holds some/fraction of a gelatinous liver/quivering in his hands…” What makes his work so enjoyable is not only his well-described world but also the fun he has with it, as when he ends the same poem with the line,” “Meanwhile I order desert.” The book flirts with food and sex, comparing breastfeeding and sucking on a straw or rotisserie chickens and pornographic images, until it climaxes in the final poem “Cannibalism,” that begins:
“And what could be more intimate?/ To deflesh a skull/ crack a femur/ to get down/ to the very marrow/ Is there a greater/ act of love?”

His other book “No One Dies At The Au Bon Pain,” doesn’t hold together as well, but it is no less engaging and accessible. The topics are self reflection and relationships, especially those that end. He still exercises that eye for the absurd amid the mundane, as in “Public Restrooms” where :”

“ I once viewed them as religious places,/ men with their backs to me/ in front of urinals/ hands clasped together/ at their crotch/ as if in prayer.” His writing here, though, is less witty than straight to the bone, the bone an image he returns to in several poems.

The two books together show Doug Holder to be a poet of the people, not absorbed in navel gazing language games but reaching out and shaking readers awake.”

S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.